Perdidas. Side A: Consuelo

How many voices fit in a silence?

When Consuelo was 17 years old, she made a promise. Two years earlier, she had woken up one morning in a sort of reform school in Madrid, 600 kilometers from her home. No one explained to her what she was doing there, or why she had a suitcase next to her, with clothes to stay and live in. She spent two years in that and other centers, between isolation rooms and forced labor, between mass and confessionals. It would take her years, many years, to understand that what she experienced was not an isolated case, but a network that the Franco regime created throughout the country to control women’s bodies. And she understood it this way: talking with other inmates, at night, in secret, about something they had never talked about before; fulfilling her promise.